The Comscore article emphasises the need for companies to market effectively and understand and engage and interact with an audience who spend considerable time using social network channels.

The eMarketer data is something that academic libraries have been aware of for some time especially with regard to learning behaviours and the overly used Digital Native tag. Older generations who study can and do learn how to work, research and interact online even though they have known a world without such connectivity.

Social Media and the Workplace by Common Craft

Companies can’t afford to be left behind in adopting social networking tools and communication strategies

Encourage employees to be part of online conversations

Develop official accounts on social media

Monitor them for customer comments eg Twitter search

Develop social media guidelines and adhere to them eg. never get angry, play the issue not the person, are you qualified to answer this question?

Participate and build trust

Google Wave
I had looked at Google Wave prior to this course but never really used it and personally I’ve never actually met anyone who’s used it or even talked about it. This doesn’t mean that isn’t a popular tool but I still find it curious for such a big name.

Key points:

Collaboration and communication in one tool good for creating documents

Playback facility relays how the wave built up

Hosted conversation

Embedding

Roots to interface with other systems anything with an API

Translation

Survival Guide: Online Social Networking

I wanted to take a shower after reading this article. As I’m from the Bill Hicks attitude towards marketing in general (Satan’s spawn filling the world with violent garbage) I found it very exploitative and found little relevance here for use in a library context.

Social networking for a business is a survival tool and an opportunity to raise product awareness.

Social networking systems balance providing trust of the user in terms of privacy between people and keeping barriers to network creation to a minimum.

Concerns:

Privacy: read the privacy policy. Not sure about this. Who bothers? They are usually so long and tedious. Facebook has received some criticism regarding their policy and whether they are forwarding user information to third parties (Wall Street Journal 2010)